I am puzzled. I don’t understand why so many people keep claiming that President Obama refuses to say that terrorists slaughtering their way through the Middle East are Islamic radicals.

By his own words — by his own description of a main terror threat in Iraq, Syria, and Libya — Obama has repeatedly and emphatically identified the bloody butchers as Islamic. In fact, the president makes a point of using a specific term for the terrorists that’s preferred by those in his administration — ISIL.

What does the acronym ISIL stand for? The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It’s a group of radical, brutal, barbaric Islamists whose stated intent is to form a caliphate.

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And while Obama pretends out of one side of his mouth not to call the terror fighters Islamic, out of the other side he clearly and consistently refers to them as ISIL — Islamic.

As he has done many times over the last few months, President Obama just this past week used the term ISIL — Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — to describe the militants in the Middle East. While claiming he would not give those terrorists “legitimacy” by associating them with Islam, he did that very thing…time and again.

Daily Kos noted the president’s words at the workshop-and-seminar-driven White House Summit on “Violent Extremism”:

…we are here at this summit because of the urgent threat from groups like al Qaeda and ISIL….Al Qaeda and ISIL and groups like it are desperate for legitimacy.

In that same Daily Kos article, author Ian Reifowitz twisted himself into awkward contortions trying to defend Obama’s message confusion that some could argue reflects the president’s obvious lack of moral clarity as well as his ideological ambiguity when it comes to identifying a dangerous enemy of Western civilization.

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“Can anyone reading or listening to these remarks truthfully claim that President Obama is denying a connection between ISIL and Islam, or that he doesn’t understand the nature of the conflict?” wrote Reiowitz. He then went on to say:

So is the president right to refuse to describe ISIL and al Qaida as Islamic or even Islamist—even though that’s what they are?

Is he right to reject the use of any form of the word Islamic or Muslim to characterize them? You betcha.

Again, I am puzzled. Is this Daily Kos apologist for Obama’s lack of logic and manifest crisis of identity when it comes to naming the enemy trying to say that the president is right in denying the truth? Sounds as though he is, indeed.

I guess that would make Barack Obama a “denier” — the dreaded label that so many liberals try to pin on conservatives when it comes to such issues as climate change and charges of racism in America.

When it comes to the left’s denial of facts, here again I must admit my puzzlement. The leading leftist voices in the administration — from Obama to Biden to Kerry to DHS Secretary Johnson — are constantly denying that what ISIL leaders say is really what they mean.

No matter how often or how forcefully Islamist militants declare they are inspired by and acting in accordance with the basic principles of Islam, the top non-Muslim administration officials — presumably, though, Islamic scholars of some note — say those terrorists don’t know what they’re talking about.